Digital Foundry tested the PlayStation 5 Pro's power consumption and discovered some surprising results. According to its three-way discussion piece on YouTube featuring Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie, the PlayStation 5 Pro consumes practically no additional power than the base PS5, despite featuring a significantly more powerful GPU.
Digital Foundry tested the PS5 Pro in Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24. All three games were compared to the launch model of the PS5, the refreshed variant dubbed the PS5 Slim, and the Pro model, with the Pro running the Pro-exclusive version of all three games with enhanced graphical capabilities.
PS5 Pro Power Consumption Tested vs PS5 Slim vs Launch PS5 - YouTube
Elden Ring saw the PS5 Pro operating at virtually identical power draw to the PS5 Slim. In one instance of the video, the Pro model operated at 214.1 watts of power consumption, the PS5 Slim model at 216.2 watts, and the PS5 Launch model at 201.3 watts. Frame rates were inevitably much higher on the Pro, operating at 52 FPS, the PS5 Slim at 40 FPS, and the PS5 launch model at 37 FPS. (The frame rate variance between the Slim and launch models should be taken lightly, as the information displayed was taken from one snapshot of Digital Foundry's benchmark run. Both consoles are the same in terms of performance.) Effectively, the PS5 Pro was operating at the same power as the PS5 Slim, while providing a 30% higher frame rate.
Spider-Man 2 showed a slightly different story due to the game being locked to 60 FPS on all three consoles. In the same scenario, the PS5 Pro yielded the highest wattage at 232 watts, the PS5 Slim at 218.2 watts, and the PS5 launch model at 208.1 watts. In Spider-Man 2, the Pro consumed 6% more power than the PS5 Slim and 11% more power than the launch version. There were no comparisons for the F1 24 title, but Digital Foundry showed the PS5 Pro operating at around 235 watts in-game, locked at 60FPS.
Note the launch model and Slim should not be taken lightly; power consumption can change based on silicon quality, which explains why the Slim is performing worse than the launch model. Variance in silicon quality means that certain consoles can operate at their advertised CPU clock speeds at lower voltages compared to others.
Digital Foundry's testing confirmed that the PS5 Pro operates at very similar power consumption targets as the base PS5 models, despite featuring a significantly more powerful GPU. This came as a surprise to Digital Foundry, who thought the console might consume upwards of 300 watts.
The PS5 Pro is armed with an 8-core Zen 2 CPU and a 16.7 TFLOP capable RDNA-based GPU, with 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The regular PS5 models ship with the same CPU (though CPU clocks could be different) but with a significantly weaker 10.28 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU, featuring and 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
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Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer
Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.
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22 CommentsComment from the forums
bit_user Does anyone have figures for its idle or standby power? My CFI-1200 PS5 idles at about 51 W and has a 3 W standby power consumption. Video Playback uses about 72 W.
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helper800 bit_user said:
Does anyone have figures for its idle or standby power? My CFI-1200 PS5 idles at about 51 W and has a 3 W standby power consumption. Video Playback uses about 72 W.Thats about in line with what my PC did at idle with a 3900x and the 3080.
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newtechldtech Still waiting for AMD to release such technology for desktop PCs...
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helper800 newtechldtech said:
Still waiting for AMD to release such technology for desktop PCs...This is a zen 2 APU, we are currently on zen 5 for desktop CPUs. What specific technology are you referring to?
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bit_user newtechldtech said:
Still waiting for AMD to release such technology for desktop PCs...Wait for a Strix Halo mini PC, then. It will have a comparable GPU to the base PS5, a much more powerful CPU and a 256-bit memory datapath. The main downside will be that LPDDR5 will still offer only about half as much bandwidth as the PS5's GDDR6.
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Heat_Fan89 Why is it I get the impression they're trying real hard to sell us something we really don't need? I'm still not sold on a PS5 Pro when even Sony admitted that we are at the end of the PS5 lifecycle. This would have been a better sell if it was released a year ago and for $599, $100 more than the base PS5 with a disc drive included.
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umeng2002_2 Sony and MS want RT in their consoles, but AMD is a generation behind nVidia™ in RT, never mind upscaling and frame generation. Without RT in games, these consoles would clearly offer purchase-worthy performance.
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Mcnoobler umeng2002_2 said:
Sony and MS want RT in their consoles, but AMD is a generation behind nVidia™ in RT, never mind upscaling and frame generation. Without RT in games, these consoles would clearly offer purchase-worthy performance.It actually is quite capable for $699. It doesn't get credit, but the PS5 Pro is better than majority of PC gamers rigs per Steam hardware survey, and I think thats why they are so angry about it (PC gamers all over any PS5 Pro media comment sections stirring up tribalism).
RT simply isn't there on the hardware, but they are going to try to force it anyways, unfortunately. Marketing for 2-3x RT vs base PS5 sounds great on paper, but the PS5 was awful at RT without significant compromise. It's like marketing 2-3x more cache when all you had was 1mb in it in the first place. 3mb? Yeah, no. They also need Ray Reconstruction and a better upscaler, as in DF Jedi Survivor there was a lot of shimmering/noise. Alan Wake as well. If they ditched RT, it is actually solid hardware.
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bit_user Mcnoobler said:
It actually is quite capable for $699. It doesn't get credit, but the PS5 Pro is better than majority of PC gamers rigs per Steam hardware survey, and I think thats why they are so angry about itFor me, the issue really is how much more it costs vs. what you get. I bought my PS5 in summer of last year, shortly after the supply problems finally got sorted out and the N6 respin (CFI-1200) models were in the channel. Mine has the disc drive and I got it on sale for just $450. However, let's compare the list price of $400 for the original discless model vs. $700 for the Pro (which is also discless).
The main upgrade seems to be a GPU that's about 62.5% faster and maybe about 28.6% more memory bandwidth. Over a 4-year span, that amount of improvement actually seems like it's a little behind the curve! At the time of launch, Zen 2 was only about a year old (with Zen 3 having just launched) and now we're on Zen 5, yet the CPU cores didn't improve at all.
I'll go out on a limb and hazard a guess that the PS5 Pro's SoC is probably even cheaper to manufacture than the PS5's originally was. So, for Sony to basically charge 75% more for these specs basically seems like a ripoff. It's not enough improvement to justify that, given the amount of time that passed. Even after accounting for inflation. The only way it remotely makes sense is that they're Sony and they have a captive audience, with some people who are simply wiling to pay that much.
Mcnoobler said:
(PC gamers all over any PS5 Pro media comment sections stirring up tribalism).Now, this is the first critical thing I've posted about it, so don't think I'm on some kind of crusade. I'm just thinking about it and this is how I see it. Also, I'm no PC gamer, FWIW.
Mcnoobler said:
RT simply isn't there on the hardware, but they are going to try to force it anyways, unfortunately. Marketing for 2-3x RT vs base PS5 sounds great on paper, but the PS5 was awful at RT without significant compromise. It's like marketing 2-3x more cache when all you had was 1mb in it in the first place. 3mb? Yeah, no.Heh, perhaps not unlike how they tried to tell people the PS4 was a 4k console. Um, no.
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ezst036 Heat_Fan89 said:
Why is it I get the impression they're trying real hard to sell us something we really don't need? I'm still not sold on a PS5 Pro when even Sony admitted that we are at the end of the PS5 lifecycle. This would have been a better sell if it was released a year ago and for $599, $100 more than the base PS5 with a disc drive included.Does Digital Foundry have a money trail going to Sony?
Who is "they"?
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